Carly Schmitt is a public artist and artistic entrepreneur. Schmitt is the President, founder and CEO of Artist @ Large, a small art business under which she executes large-scale public art projects and curates various community-based artistic initiatives. She holds a B.A. from Macalester College, and a M.F.A from the Bauhaus University in Weimar Germany. She is a recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellowship, and has presented her work at the German House in New York City, the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin, and at various universities throughout the United States and Europe. Schmitt is best known for her work that blurs the conventional boundary between art and life through a variety of artistic approaches. Her public artworks aims to span gaps, build bridges and bring people together through a system of unexpected circumstances and extraordinary contexts. Schmitt’s work can be encountered throughout Europe and the United States.
During The Arts Diplomacy Festival 2012 “Cultural Diplomacy in Practice” organized by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, she held a Lecture called “”Food as an Emergency Diplomatic Tool in Contemporary Public Art”, explaining her activity and the potential that art has to bring people together and the importance of the art making process. For Carly Schmitt, creating an art work together is creating a space in which people come together, meet each other and initiate conversation. By doing this, by “bringing people together to start a conversation or just start an interaction is in itself an art-work”
More of the lecture can be viewed in the video below.